Oh Yeah? Well, My Prefrontal Cortex Can Beat Up Your Prefrontal Cortex

I have started a new exercise regimen. For once, it's one that I actually enjoy and might even continue doing.

It all started a few months ago, when I got a couple of preloaded credit cards. These cards, however, could only be used at certain stores (which means they aren't really preloaded credit cards as much as store gift cards, and that happens to be a pretty lame move if you are a company giving these away, but that's a very different issue). After browsing through the list of stores and determining that the only participating store I cared about that was anywhere near me was Circuit City, I decided to get a Nintendo DS Lite. (This all took much longer than it seems here, since this also involved having to wait for there to ever be any DS Lites in stock, and there was a shortage that was not quite of Wii-like proportions, but not insignificant either.) For those of you not familiar with the DS or DS Lite, it is the newest Nintendo handheld gaming system, which utilizes two screens, one of which is touch sensitive. (It also has a microphone and is WiFi enabled, but that has nothing to do with this post; that's just more stuff I think is really cool about it.)

One of the game available for the Nintendo DS is "Brain Age," a game in which you perform various tasks (simple arithmetic, counting syllables, word memorization, reading aloud, Stroop tests, sudoku puzzles) all of which are designed to help increase your brain's ability to function quickly. The game first tests your brain's "age," a metric of how quickly you give correct answers in various exercises, and tells you how old your brain is with 20 being the best possible and 80 being the maximum age given. Once you have determined your brain age, you can perform the brain training programs to help improve your score in the future. You can retake the brain age test once a day or as rarely as you'd like to keep track of your overall progress. The more training programs you do, the more programs are unlocked for you to try them. The basic principle is that just like any muscle you must give your brain a workout to keep it in shape and to try to improve its performance (the theory here being that the brain exercise increases blood flow to the brain).

So, how do I think it works? I love it. If nothing else, doing the math training has made me less reliant on calculators. I'm working on skills I had let go long before. Is it really improving my brain function? I don't know that for sure, but it at least makes me feel like my brain isn't going to be the 98 lb 0.98 kg weakling getting sand kicked in its face.